Never Was, then called The Gatehouse, launched its first blog in February 2009. Before then, we had been a hand-coded HTML website.

Several members of our message-board community, the Smoking Lounge, joined as bloggers, including Kevin Cooney, Hilde Heyvaert and Ella Kremper. Tome Wilson of the Dieselpunks community wrote a weekly “Dieselpunks News” column.

In April 2010, The Gatehouse switched to a picture blog on Tumblr. We wouldn’t have a proper blog again until October 2011. The website you are reading now is a continuation of that third blog.

Many of the posts from the first blog have been lost, but I have been able to recover some.

The Gatehouse first came online almost ten years ago, in 2008. A lot has changed in the steam- and dieselpunk scene since then. The former has arguably gone mainstream. The latter is now recognized as a genre and a subculture in its own right. We have seen blogs and webzines come and go. The Gatehouse itself underwent many changes (read our history here). Now it’s time for the next chapter.

With a new name and a new domain, we are upping our game. Continuing in the tradition of The Gatehouse, Never Was will be more of a magazine than a blog, with long-form stories about architecture, history and genre theory as well as the event, book and movie reviews you have come to expect of us.